This and that for your Tuesday reading.
- Lauren Pelley reports on the strain Canada's children's hospitals in particular are facing in the midst of COVID-19's sixth wave. David Axe discusses the most important risk factors in the potential emergence of new global waves, while Smitri Mallapaty offers a reminder that the coronavirus can spread and mutate in deer and other animal populations. Sun Yoo et al. study the prevalence of the development of long COVID (being about 30% of all people treated) while Antonios Koutalos et al. find that long COVID's effects include harm to the musculoskeletal system. And Gili Regev-Yochay et al. study the effectiveness of a fourth vaccine dose.
- Kim Siever highlights how Canadian grocery stores have raked in windfall profits during the course of the pandemic while pointing the finger elsewhere for the higher prices they're charging to people trying to buy the necessities of life.
- Meanwhile, Geraint Harvey points out that businesses are predictably responding to the slightest upward wage pressure with a round of automation to eliminate jobs which might otherwise have to pay a living wage. And Paul Christopher Gray and Jordan House compare the successful Amazon organizing drive in Staten Island to previous attempts in Alberta and elsewhere.
- Finally, Umair Haque holds out the prospect that the future will eventually get better - but only well into the future, and based on the hope that younger generations will prove far more successful than the ones now in power at defining and working toward the common good.
I expect Jupiter to lead to better medicine but it is uncertain how it will be delivered to billions. A Callisto mine would require understanding radiation to limit exposure. Also, Jupiter's magnetic field causes radiation. Some of this radiation is the equivalent of lensed and precisionly threaded medical radiation sources of the future. You can fire a narrow beam avoiding the intestines and marrow if you understand how the natural beams happen near Jupiter. Upregulating and down-regulating various body functions are dangerous to test here, but essential to test where mission failure suggests safe hawkish R+D is okay. Cures for allergies and weakened immunity, treatments for exhaustion and depression, and radiation proofing and cancers curing, may be enabled by R+D enabled by Jupiter. Ice armour will need to be rapidly turnable and a radar network used to locate radiation dangers. With all the metals, imaging for all will be available in the 2070s; bio stuff uncertain timeline.
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